"Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand--that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us."
~ Annie Dillard, "An Expedition to the Pole"

15 April 2008

You know you're incurably addicted to litblogs when...

'The novel is dead. As dead as alchemy.' He cut out with his hands, with the calipers, dismissing that as well. 'I realized that one day before the war. Do you know what I did? I burnt every novel I possessed. Dickens. Cervantes. Dostoievsky. Flaubert. All the great and all the small. I even burnt something I wrote myself when I was too young to know better. I burnt them out there. It took me all day. The sky took their smoke, the earth their ashes. It was a fumigation. I have been happier and healthier ever since.' I remembered my own small destroying; and thought, grand gestures are splendid--if you can afford them. He picked up a book and slapped the dust off it. 'Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?'

'For fun?'

'Fun!' He pounced on the word. 'Words are for truth. For facts. Not fiction.'

'I see.'

'For this.' A life of Franklin Roosevelt. 'This.' A French paperback on astrophysics. 'This. Look at this.' It was an old pamphlet--An Alarme for Sinners, Containing the Last Words of the Murderer Robert Foulkes, 1679. 'There, take that and read it over the week-end. See if it is not more real than all the historical novels ever written.'

Naturally, I wrote "Pure Evil" in the margin.

It's been surprisingly difficult to get into The Magus. Nicholas is a self-deluded cad--but he's supposed to be. It's Conchis I'm having trouble with. The guy is not impressing me at all and strikes me as inanely juvenile. A third of the way through, and the novel still feels hollow to me.

But I'm sticking with it. Fowles is definitely up to something--and I've found more references to the central idea of the above passage. I'll say more when I've safely gotten through it (and try not to choke on all the egotism and pseudo-intellectual fakery in the meantime).

2 comments:

Isn't it interesting that a character in a novel is dismissing the novel form? Clearly, Fowles doesn't think this. Furthermore, Fowles knows whoever is reading this novel doesn't think this. It is one of many moments of what I've called "meta-reading" in the book: moments when the reader is required to consider his/her experience reading the text in a conscious way.

It's one of my favorite books--if you do stick it out, I don't think it will disappoint.

Yes, what you've described is an interesting aspect of the work. I think what was bothering me so much was all of Nicolas' solipsism and Conchis' inept "philosophizing". The whole novel felt like a sham immitation of a novel (which may have been the point).

But I hit page 400 yesterday and am finally, genuinely into it. I'll post more when I've finished and gathered my thoughts.

“There are those who maintain that you can't demand anything of the reader. They say the reader knows nothing about art, and that if you are going to reach him, you have to be humble enough to descend to his level. This supposes that the aim of art is to teach, which it is not, or that to create anything which is simply a good-in-itself is a waste of time. Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it. We hear a great deal about humility being required to lower oneself, but it requires an equal humility and a real love of the truth to raise oneself and by hard labor to acquire higher standards.” ~ Flannery O'Connor